


sixteen days

by 1stwins



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Coming of Age, Demon!Mark, Demons, Existential Angst, M/M, Teen Angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 10:10:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19271098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1stwins/pseuds/1stwins
Summary: Donghyuck was truly at a crossroads. On one hand he felt like the past seventeen years had rushed by and that there was no way he was seventeen. He didn’t feel like he should be stressing over growing up, he still felt like a lost high school freshman. But on the other hand he felt like he was far too old and had nothing to show for it. He’d been existing for seventeen years, going through the motions laid out for him by figures of authority, and never taking any initiative to live beyond that. That is, until he stumbles across a creepy mansion and a black haired demon on a spontaneous 2am walk.





	sixteen days

**Author's Note:**

> hi! this is my first mh fic & i've had it in the drafts for a long time.. the thing is i'm not finished with it yet! i decided to publish the first chapter as motivation to finish it. atm im thinking 4 chapters but we'll see what happens. i hope u enjoy!

 

 

~

 

 

Donghyuck was only seventeen years old, yet he felt like he was running out of time. He felt as though he hadn’t lived enough, and that he’d blink and suddenly be in his mid thirties having a midlife crisis. Donghyuck couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt alive, and as a living, breathing organism he thought that was alarming. This week in particular however, the feeling of being a dead soul in a living corpse was making itself even more known. It was the beginning of dead week and he was in his second semester of junior year in high school, and things weren’t looking too good for him.

The brown haired boy is doing the math, crunching the numbers all sorts of ways, and it’s looking seemingly impossible that he is going to pass all of his classes. He’d fallen into a sort of a slump the last grading period, and his current (final) one of the year, his missing assignments began to pile up while his will to complete them began to rapidly decline. It did nothing to mend the awful mood he was finding himself in due to his existential predicament. All Donghyuck could think of while he was laying in bed and ignoring his backpack full of work for the past few weeks was “None of this matters, this assignment won’t matter in five years, so what’s the point?”

Maybe his lack of will in school lately could also be attributed to him being shipped off across town to live with his grandmother. It was in preparation for the summer, his parents would be traveling nonstop due to the demand from their jobs. (They both worked for some company and have been since before Donghyuck was born. The job often required them to move around a lot, but after his mother became pregnant they decided to settle down and try to work in their hometown for as long as possible. As long as possible stretched to seventeen years, and apparently couldn’t be held off any longer since Donghyuck was being told to pack away six weeks before school would end for the summer. _“Your grandma is so delighted to have you, Donghyuck. We thought we’d send you off early so you can get a feel for her place.”_ His parents could put it any kind of way they wanted to, but Donghyuck still knew they were sending him away so they could spend time together before traveling around for work. Whatever, it’s not like he had any other choice in where to stay over the summer anyways.)

To put it simply, Donghyuck’s grandma lived in the middle of nowhere. Maybe that was an exaggeration, or a hyperbole, as Donghyuck’s english teacher would like him to say. His grandma did not live in the middle of nowhere, however it was a town over from Donghyuck’s hometown and therefore an extra thirty minutes on his commute to school. He had to catch a city bus to his school bus stop (which was about a thirty minute bus drive) that then drove him the extra thirty minutes to school. Which means that he’s had to wake up about an hour early to get ready every morning for the past four weeks. Donghyuck endured it because he didn’t really have much of a choice and because he didn’t really mind. He quite liked the calmness of the city bus in the mornings, and the bus driver lady was nice and let him ride without paying. 

His grandma’s house was well… a grandma’s house. It was surprisingly two stories, and it was furnished and decorated in such a grandma way. Drapes as curtains and couches modeled from the eighties. It smelled l ike old perfume and vanilla and on Friday’s, homemade chocolate chip cookies. The first floor was made up of a living room, kitchen, bedroom, guest room and a bathroom. Stairs led to the second floor which had a similar layout to the first one, sans the kitchen. Donghyuck’s grandmother used the bedroom on the first floor and typically stayed down there since she wasn’t able to walk up the stairs that often (due to old age and not really wanting to in the first place). Donghyuck pretty much had the entire second floor to himself, another reason why he wouldn’t complain about the living arrangement because it was much more spacious than his one bedroom in his parents’ one story home. 

In the past four weeks Donghyuck had settled into his grandma’s home relatively well, he knew the home because he’d spent many Christmases and Thanksgivings here over the years, so it wasn’t a drastic change. He was also not losing his mind over the situation because he knew that this was only a temporary thing for the summer to come, and that he’d hopefully move back in with his parents within the next few months. However, with the move being so close to the end of the year and still during school it certainly affected his ability to complete his work and focus overall. He hadn’t slept that well the first couple of nights and that led to him being groggy and falling asleep in class. He also didn’t know how to do homework in the new environment because he was so used to doing it either at school or in his old room. He was struggling, and his current grades heavily reflected that. 

Donghyuck had to figure out how he was going to pass all of his classes, and he had to muster up some kind of will to finish all of his late assignments. It was Monday afternoon and he’d arrived home off the city bus about an hour ago. He’d spoken to his grandmother and grabbed a few snacks from the kitchen before climbing the stairs and closing himself off into his room. He currently had twenty missing assignments, respectively from different classes, and he had the will to complete absolutely none of them. He knew that if he was going to not feel like a total fuck up, though, he needed to finish all of them and at least feel like he tried. 

Donghyuck had debated this with himself in the time that he was laying on his bed and not completing his assignments. He’d pondered over it, and he was still thinking about it, really. Why did he care so much about his grades? His parents never really looked at his report cards, stressing the fact that they’d be proud of him no matter what numbers were shown on a piece of paper. Yet growing up the brunette boy always went above and beyond to excel in his classes and achieve their approval. Donghyuck was realistic, and he knew his grades from his entire high school career were quite average. On top of that he participated in no clubs outside of school and he didn’t volunteer or have any kind of job. He was doing what he could just to get by. No college would want that very much, so he was stressed about that too. What would he do after high school? What was his life going to become? Why did he feel like he was being forced to grow up and make life changing decisions while being so young?

Donghyuck was truly at a crossroads. On one hand he felt like the past seventeen years had rushed by and that there was no way he was seventeen. He didn’t feel like he should be stressing over growing up, he still felt like a lost high school freshman. But on the other hand he felt like he was far too old and had nothing to show for it. He’d been existing for seventeen years, going through the motions laid out for him by figures of authority, and never taking any initiative to live beyond that. But why? Why has it come to this? Why was he now getting this sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that he would become nothing if the numbers on a piece of paper with his name on it weren’t high enough? Why did those numbers determine the entirety of his future? And why was that future rushing towards him faster than a crowd into a Walmart on Black Friday?

Donghyuck sighs to himself and sits up from his bed, grabbing his backpack and making his way to the desk in his room. He figures he doesn’t have time to ponder over the why’s if he wants to pass his classes. He pulls out his laptop and the packets that he has to do, checking the time once his laptop had powered on. _6:32pm._ Donghyuck had a feeling he wouldn’t be sleeping at his usual time tonight. 

 

 

~

 

 

It was two in the morning. 

Donghyuck had worked tirelessly and without any breaks for the past eight hours and managed to finish half of his missing assignments. He was now only missing his pre-calc and physics work, but he knew a certain someone would be able to help him with that. Donghyuck wonders if he should even bother with sleeping since he knew that going to bed after midnight typically made him so tired that he’d sleep through his alarms, resulting in him waking up late and missing both of his buses as well as school. Donghyuck didn’t think he could afford to miss another day of school with it being dead week. Finals were approaching and teachers were using class time to review crucial material that would be on their finals. And if Donghyuck wanted his semester averages to look decent, he needed his final grades to not suck. 

So, sleeping probably wasn’t the safest option. 

Since Donghyuck has about three hours before he has to get ready for school, he wonders what he should do to pass the time. His grandmother was already fast asleep by this point, so he couldn’t do anything that would wake her up. He also didn’t feel like studying since he’d spent the last eight hours completely focused on school work and he felt like his brain cells were completely fried. It hit him suddenly, and before Donghyuck even had time to think it through rationally the brunette was already leaving his desk chair and putting on a pair of shoes. He was going to go for a walk. A walk at two in the morning? Yes, that’s exactly what Donghyuck needed. It would allow him to sort through his thoughts and keep him awake while he needed to kill time. 

Donghyuck had lots of newfound freedom while staying at his grandma’s house. Although many of his parents rules still stood, he had new leverage, his grandma was old so it was a thousand times easier to be sneaky when it came to her. Leaving the house without anyone knowing was strictly forbidden (in the case of Donghyuck’s parents and his grandma), but Donghyuck knew that he’d be able to do it and come home without his grandma knowing. He’d come back home a bit before he would begin getting ready for school and she’d never know because she doesn’t wake up until hours later anyways. It was foolproof. 

Although the plan was foolproof and all, Donghyuck still didn't want to overstep and risk it. So, he knew he had to sneak out of a window instead of the front or backdoors. After the brunette grabbed his phone and a jacket, he made his way to the window in his bedroom. Donghyuck knew how to go about this because of one past incident that occurred during the four weeks that he’d been living here. He’d had to stay after school with a certain someone and he’d let his grandmother know in advance. She wasn’t going to be home that night because she had to go into town for a meeting with some of her other grandma pals. She gave him a spare key and he was going to be dropped off to his bus stop by said certain someone where he’d then catch the city bus to his grandmother’s and use the spare key to get in. Of course Donghyuck was an idiot and left the spare key in his bedroom, so he had to figure out a way to get into the house since his grandmother wouldn’t be home until hours later, and Donghyuck would rather die a slow death than die from the embarrassment of calling his grandmother and telling her he’d locked himself out. So, long story short, he’d figured out a way to climb to his window and get in (he was lucky that he remembered that it was unlocked, but you seem to remember the smallest of details in situations like that).

Now, here Donghyuck was at two in the morning a few weeks later. He was going to sneak out of the window, climb down, and go for a walk. Before Donghyuck could begin to get rational and somehow talk himself out of the little adventure, he opened the window and began climbing down. He tried to be as quiet and as fast as possible, and he landed to the ground safely in under a minute. 

Donghyuck turns around and begins walking. He leaves his grandmother’s lawn, leaves the subdivision she lived in, and then he’s walking through the town’s streets. It’s pitch black dark outside, but luckily the town has street lamps so Donghyuck isn’t making a complete fool of himself by stumbling around without being able to see where he’s going. He’s walking on a sidewalk and he has no idea where he’s going. He’s not sure if he even has a destination. He’s just walking and letting his feet guide him in the direction that his gut tells him to follow. 

It’s times like these when Donghyuck feels the most free. Not only in pursuing small acts of rebellion, but when he acts on impulse and does dumb things without really thinking them through. He feels in control, and he feels liberated. All his life, Donghyuck has always had to follow the rules of authority figures. In school from teachers and faculty, at home from his mother and father, even at his grandmother’s house. He’s always had to do what adults have wanted him to do, he never really felt like he had a say in how things went in his life. But when he does little stupid things like this it’s all him, and he loves that. He loves knowing that he’s making his own decisions and being his own person, it’s terrifying and exhilarating all at once. Donghyuck feels a smile come to his face, and he starts singing and skipping down the sidewalk. 

He’s sure he looks like a madman but he’s so happy he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Donghyuck never wants to go back to his grandmother’s, he doesn’t want to go back to school, he wants to stay in this moment forever. 

When Donghyuck opens his eyes he stops dead in his tracks, the song he was singing stopping as well. He really doesn’t know where he is, and that’s becoming more apparent as the seconds tick by. Donghyuck can’t help but feel like he should leave wherever he is as soon as possible. He’s never been in this area of town, and he finds it mind boggling because it’s not possible that he could’ve gone so far in such a short amount of time. _Time._ What time is it? Donghyuck pulls out his phone and checks the screen _3:33am._ How is it possible that he’s been walking for over thirty minutes? Was the brunette walking that fast or did he really have no sense of time? Regardless of whatever the answer was to that, he knew he should probably get out of where he was and head back to his grandma’s. 

He was facing a house he’d never seen before, and he thought that was odd in itself because wasn’t his grandma’s town relatively small? Surely she would’ve mentioned a house that looked like this one? It was large, arguably the largest residence in the town. The house actually looked more like a mansion. It was upkept and definitely clean, the only thing off putting to him was the fact that the entire mansion was pitch black. There was not one source of light coming from the house, and with it being so dark out things certainly weren’t helping the mansions case. There was a large black fence surrounding the mansion and Donghyuck could make out a pathway leading to the porch through the bars of the fence. He couldn’t see much else but for some reason Donghyuck could feel fear bubbling in his gut, the entire scene made him feel uneasy and he knew he should leave soon. 

“What are you doing out here at this time of night?”

 

 

~

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> ooh ended on a cliffhanger ... pls lmk what u think so far! comments & kudos greatly appreciated. we'll meet mark next chapter ;)


End file.
